UK is no longer a world leader – but we can use that to our advantage
The sooner the UK can accept it’s now an underdog – and exploit the advantages that come with it – the better, writes Tim Dier
Gone are the days of thick, stone fortress-like bank branches intended to convey strength and security. Nowadays, a bank’s brand is its golden goose – fragile, priceless and to be protected at all costs.
This poses challenges when it comes to expansion. Few senior bankers fancy the reputational battering, financial drubbings or sheer distraction of venturing into new products or markets. Bulge bracket behemoths prefer to lurk in the slipstream. Goldman’s bruising experience with its Marcus consumer-banking foray serves as a reminder why.
Instead, the big investment banks sit back and watch startups sweat it out, perhaps dipping a cautious toe, but taking care not to cause a splash. If the pioneers then strike gold, they will pounce on the opportunity, learn from their mistakes, unleash institutional might and scale up rapidly – or simply buy the lot. In banking we called it being an aggressive follower. No boardroom heads rolled here. You have just witnessed the second mover advantage in all its glory.
This playbook translates neatly into politics. Developing countries skip centuries of trial and error, connecting their citizens to faster broadband than we even knew existed. Countries like Singapore leapfrog and outpace their former rulers on every metric imaginable. Closer to home, in the corridors of Westminster, the same logic holds.
When many voters around the world were electing governments on tickets to curb immigration and cut wasteful spending, our electorate put turfing out the Tories as their top priority. The hard yards of deporting illegal immigrants and slashing wasteful spending? Left to another day. But the reckoning looms.
The second-mover advantage
By accident, not design, both the Conservative Party under Kemi Badenoch and Reform UK now enjoy a second-mover advantage: not only can they learn from Keir Starmer’s mistake of not having any plan at all, but also from Trump’s patchy first term and his exile years in the wilderness plotting a comeback. Being forewarned is forearmed.
The Republican movement had a plan. Across US policy and advocacy outfits, three efforts stand out. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 produced a 900-page policy guide, the Mandate for Leadership, and identified and trained thousands of potential staff; Trump’s Agenda 47 outlined his vision through 47 video pledges, rallied the faithful and served as a roadmap for post-inauguration priorities. Meanwhile, the America First Policy Institute quietly prepared nearly 300 ‘oven ready’ executive orders.
There is much to learn from the US on implementation, too. A future UK government that prioritises the prosperity and security of its citizens will need to move fast before they get bogged down, yet without cutting corners.
Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) mistakes serve as a warning: poorly trained workforce leading to needless loss of life, dodgy statistics eroding public trust, and flawed data leading to deporting the innocent. Not to mention the paramilitary style uniforms. These slip-ups play into the hands of those who will try their darndest to frustrate border security.
Closer to home, Denmark’s tough deportation rules and willingness to play hardball with the ECHR offers lessons we can learn, long before attempts are made to extract ourselves from the Convention. Even the current home secretary Shabana Mahmood has dispatched officials to learn from the Danes.
On taking an axe to government spending, the checkered success of America’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), launched amid great fanfare, means we must sharpen our pencils. Otherwise, our own bid to tighten our belts will resemble a dismal cover band, all imitation and no soul.
Reform UK’s rather embarrassing failure to identify any significant savings in Kent County Council serves as a deafening warning shot. Low hanging fruit is in limited supply.
In this country we are all too prone to kidding ourselves about being a “world leader”. The NHS is supposedly “the envy of the world”, although nobody wants to replicate it. We’ve gone further and faster on decarbonisation than any other developed country, but nobody else fancies the deindustrialisation ghost train. We want to be the best country in the world for starting a business, all the while piling on billions of pounds of regulatory burdens.
We need to be more realistic and accept that in many ways, we are not at the economic, technological or governmental frontier anymore. But therein also lies opportunity. We can learn from what others do, and from their mistakes. Britain has a chance to take the second mover advantage and shine as an aggressive follower.
Only after we have demonstrated that we can learn and apply what has already been discovered by others will we be eligible to lead from the front once more.
Tim Dier is a research fellow at the Centre for Policy Studies